Bad Moon Rising

There are bills in the state legislature that could possibly, though some blue moon, white magic sort of miracle, make things better.

But there are also bills out there in the legislature that through some sort of black magic, bad-moon-rising sort of travesty make things worse. Much worse.

One of the bad-moon-rising type was introduced by none other than our neighbor and Jefferson County’s favorite son, Cris Dush. That’s right, old Cris is prime sponsor of House Bill 590 which could spread the pure evil of unfettered gerrymandering to the highest office in the land.

In his co-sponsorship memorandum, Cris applies some twisted rationalizations to call for fellow house members to sign onto his bill, trying to make it sound like it would improve things, but nothing could be further from the truth.

What House Bill 590 does is elect the members of the electoral college from each separate congressional district, rather than statewide, like it is now. It actually wouldn’t be such a bad thing, if there was no such thing as Gerrymandering. But the existence of gerrymandering makes it a very, very bad thing.

If it passes, whichever party gets to gerrymander the districts gets to elect the president. In just the same way that Pennsylvania has more Democrats than Republicans, but the Republicans elected the most Congress-critters and state legislators, the majority of gerrymandered districts would go to the Republican presidential electors.

Dush’s bill is pretty simple, and it doesn’t even require an amendment to the Pennsylvania Constitution, It just adds two paragraphs to Section 1501 subsection b of the Pennsylvania Election Code:

“(1) Two of the presidential electors shall be elected at large to represent the entire Commonwealth and shall cast their ballots for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates with the greatest number of votes Statewide.

“(2) Each of the remaining presidential electors shall be elected in the presidential elector’s congressional district and shall cast a ballot for the presidential and vice-presidential candidates with the greatest number of votes in the congressional district.”

While it takes a human of great talent, intelligence and energy to make the world a better place, it seems, like the Donald, any hackified assholic clown can make things worse without too much effort at all.

As it stands, the bill has only three co-sponsors, which is a good sign, but is only a sign and carries no technical weight. It was refereed to the State Government committee, of which Dush is a member, which is a bad sign, and could be of more portent that its small number of co-sponsors.

All three cosponsors are Republicans. Besides Dush, they are the Honorable Francis Xavier Ryan of Palmyra Pennsylvania (yes, he went to Catholic school) and the Honorable Dan Moul of Gettysburg. None of those guys are heavy hitters in the Republican Party, but this could be stealth legislation, as similar stuff is popping up in Republican legislatures around the country. I’m keeping an eye on it. The saving grace is that Governor Wolf is likely to veto such crap.

☁︎ ☂ ☁︎

On the other side of the coin, we have Senate Bill 270, introduced by Daylin Leach of Philadelphia, which would have Pennsylvania join the National Popular Vote Compact. And there is a companion bill, House Bill 189, and they would, wonder of wonders, turn the Electoral College on its head.

The states in the compact pledge to award their Electoral College votes to the winner of the popular vote nationwide. This make the presidential election a popular election without changing the US Constitution. 12 states have signed on so far and as soon as states with 270 electoral votes sign on, the compact goes into effect.

Now I have a few qualms about this, as it removes one of the safety valves built into the Constitution by the Founders, but I have to admit the Electoral College hasn’t really functioned as a safety valve after all. If it had, Trump would not be president, and if the Compact was in place now, Trump would not be president.

But Senate Bill 270 and House bill 189 only have a few sponsors and they are all Democrats in a heavily Republican legislature, so I fear this is another example of Aero Porcus (my made-up phony Latin for “when pigs fly”).

But how do I know? How can you tell which bills will advance and which will never get out of committee? It’s something I’m working on, and there are a few clues, but without being a Harrisburg insider, it’s something I will likely never decipher on my own.

It’s a tough puzzle. More than five thousand bills and resolutions are introduced in the legislature in a two-year session. We are now three months into the 2017-18 session and already there are more than 1,000 House bills, 350 or so House resolutions, half a thousand Senate bills and around 75 Senate resolutions.

Only a few hundred bills, at most, will become law in any two-year session, and a lot of those are for naming bridges after war heroes, which seems a favorite pandering pastime of our Senators and Representatives.

The best I can figure is to watch the committees and see which bills they vote out to the House or Senate floor. And if a bill is some really nasty piece of work, it sometimes flies right though both chambers and get adopted before anyone knows what’s happening. Bills that would actually do us some good usually get fought over and watered down with amendments until they are mediocre mush.

And our 253 Senators and Representatives are known as one of the biggest, most bloated, over paid, ineffectual, corrupt and gerrymandered state legislatures in the country. Can this be changed? Aero Porcus, but we got to try.